The Great History of the Manor Bouchove Part 3: La Licorne and the Labyrinth

Having lived in a house the villagers of Bouchove sweetly call châtelet, I realised I have enjoyed a privileged life. This is also true for the place of my birth, Maastricht—the most beautiful town of the world, I shamelessly claim. I have grown up there in a good family with ten children. Eighteen years old, I started my study on Rural Development in Wageningen, which is the smallest university town of the Netherlands.

There, I had the luck to find my lifetime wife, who followed me to all the places in the world my ambitions reached for. She gave birth to our two daughters and a son—three children we raised together and who developed along different lines into worthy individuals.

Looking back on all this, I praise my luck and thank the Lord for it.

The author was born in Maastricht, Netherlands, before WW2. After secondary school, he moved to Wageningen to study at the Wageningen Agricultural University. That laid the basis for working in two dozen countries all over the world in the company of his wife, who gave him two girls and a boy. In 1968, he purchased a châtelet in the village of Bokhoven, that inspired him to take up local history, laying the basis for this historical novel. He stopped working in 2009 and sold the châtelet to move with his wife to a penthouse.